Commercial support

Paul van Schayck wrote:
> On 5/9/05, gslink <gslink at one.net> wrote:
>>>I recently took the list of applications from headquarters that are
>>listed as running properly and found that many of these are available
>>for little cost. I bought a few and tried to run them. Not a one ran
>>as is from the box. I was able to get all of them to run with some
>>trouble. One big problem I see with Wine is that there is no good
>>testing. As versions progress things quit running and the author has no
>>way of knowing. I have no good solution for this problem but I suspect
>>that it needs attention. It is, of course, part of the documentation
>>problem. It is not in the nature of programmers to document their work.
>>> Where would this list be? As of now there is no list of applications
> we try to keep working with every released snapshot. So developers are
> not required to check their changes against certain applications.
> What we do have is a large set of small test applications we run after changes.
>> Paul
>>Go to the Wine HQ site and click on applications database. If you need
more applications check the listed links.
This is a problem with every development effort and nobody is blaming
anybody. The larger the effort the worse it gets. This is probably the
worst problem both Microsoft and IBM have with code. If you change
anything in Wine something somewhere will probably quit running. This
is simply the price of progress. My comment, and it is not a criticism,
is that Wine still has rough edges. Eventually these will go away but
for now, you can't simply load Wine into Linux and blindly start loading
in applications. The more complex the application the more likely it
needs setup. As versions progress setup procedures change and as a
result things quit running. Microsoft Office doesn't run without setup
and neither do many of the older games such as Alice or Rune. Even
things like Warcraft come and go. This is not a criticism it is just
the way things are and that is why I think it is too early to start
thinking about commercial support.
What somebody needs to do now is to get a relationship with IBM similar
to the one that Eclipse has. IBM has a problem currently because there
is no native Lotus Notes client for Linux. Wine could easily solve this
problem. I talked to some of the marketing managers in IBM and most had
never heard of Wine. The IBM development labs are currently starting to
develop this native client. If IBM could use Wine it could save them
money and sueing Wine is one thing sueing IBM is another.